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Abstract

This project examines the problem of inaction in environmental behavior and explores why a proliferation of environmental knowledge has not generally inspired sustainable change. What explains this information-behavior gap? An Aristotelian understanding of the moral life as centered on habit accounts for this gap because habit constitutes a deep-seated knowledge embedded in the body, an alternative way of knowing the world. Habit can operate without the explicit consent of the mind; this allows people to act against their rational judgment. Thus, the reformation of environmental behavior cannot be primarily a cognitive endeavor (information) because knowledge tends to founder when pitted against habit (formation). Instead, sustainable change is first a problem of entrenched, unsustainable habits. Habit formation operates according to the dynamics of human nature. Because we are bodies moving through time and space amongst other bodies, habit formation is a social and bodily practice. Ritual is one particularly potent way to form and reform habits because it conscripts bodies into practices that shape the participants pre-theoretical understanding of reality. It is a privileged type of social practice that veils its nature under the guise of normality and operates in a constructed environment characterized by liminality. Thus, the Eucharist, the focal ritual of Christianity, is a social practice with the requisite resources necessary to challenge the habits of unsustainable behavior, specifically in the form of individualism. The Eucharist concerns the formation of a social body (the church) characterized by caritas, love that manifests itself in care for the other. In the ritualized sharing of bread, Christians practice other-oriented love, the paramount virtue of environmentalism. In fact, the Eucharist breaks down the arbitrary borders constructed between self and other and instead demands that the members of the social body learn to see their individual wellbeing as inseparable from the wellbeing of others in the whole. Eucharistic training cultivates the habit of caritas, akin to the environmental exhortation to act with respect for the earth s complex ecological interconnections. By habitually learning to disavow individualism, Christians practice, in large part, the moral foundation necessary to heed the environmental clarion call.